Help Desk Software

October 6, 2005 11:54 AM

Looking for a *free* Windows based Ticketing/Help Desk/knowledge base software. We are a small IT department that is looking for somewhere we can put solutions on how we fixed issues for looking up later.
posted by flipmiester99 to computers & internet (8 answers total)

We had the Exo PHP_Desk running for awhile on our old company website, and although I never used it* (because all of our customers knew our phone number and emails), it shore did look right purty.

*beyond testing and installation, of course, which was pretty simple after the privs were set correctly and some of the error messaging in PHP 5 was turned off.
posted by fishfucker at 12:07 PM on October 6, 2005

somewhere we can put solutions on how we fixed issues for looking up later:

try blogger.com

create a private FREE blog, make entries on your fixes/strategies

then later, you can search it.
posted by phredhead at 12:55 PM on October 6, 2005

bugzilla?
posted by Mach5 at 1:18 PM on October 6, 2005

looking for somewhere we can put solutions on how we fixed issues for looking up later.

I'm doing this with wikipedia.
posted by boo_radley at 1:40 PM on October 6, 2005

There's Open Ticket Request System. Tons of features, and a lot of documentation...so much, in fact, that sometimes finding the answer to a problem is difficult.
posted by bachelor#3 at 1:58 PM on October 6, 2005

TUTOS is a fairly robust groupware / bug tracking program. I've used it with a group to manage audio design issues and manage inventory. The resource accounting and contact database are really nice features as well. But we didn't have a whole bunch of conference rooms and such.

Track time spent on projects/tasks, who does what where and how long type of reports/graphs. Freeware LAMP webapp.
posted by mnology at 2:46 PM on October 6, 2005

i should add for people who come by later: the reason I liked the Exo-PHP Desk system is it's built with clients in mind. I've found a lot of bugtracking software does NOT work well for client-reported problems because it has a lot of technical terms and frankly, is meant for software development, not typical IT issues like "i forgot my password" "how do I FTP into my account". ExoPHP desk is simple and sometimes, simplicity wins over robustness, because it's quicker to put in place and doesn't need a lot of customization. A lot of open source solutions that i've heard are best of breed are often overkill for small companies, who'd be better off accepting some limitations and working out hacks to them then customizing a highly configurable and just plain big application/cms/whatever to suit their needs.
posted by fishfucker at 3:15 PM on October 6, 2005

dot project. rt.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 4:30 PM on October 6, 2005